Book Review: How to Cook a Tart

Reading this book on an empty stomach was such a bad idea. I was craving every gourmet dish the author was describing in luscious detail. The first few chapters passed quickly, I was too busy relishing the tastes and textures. But before I knew it, I actually got sucked into the plot: Jasmine, a zaftig cookbook author whose hubby had a affair with a Zone diet-obsessed actress, found the girl dead on her kitchen floor. For the first half of the book though, we're immersed in a sharp satire of everyone in Jasmine's life, be it her detoxing husband, her anorexic daughter, her dieting-and-failing neighbor, assorted neurotic cookbook writers, and other self-absorbed characters who are defined by food in some way or other. You won't want the murder mystery to be solved, for that would mean an end to the fun fly-on-the-wall trip through foodie land.